It’s hard to imagine thumb drives actually containing a whole lot of storage. I know the past record was 128GB, which is an impressive feat. However, Kingston just destroyed that record by releasing a new 256GB thumb drive on sale in Europe.

The DataTraveler 300 USB features a data transfer rate of 250MB per second and a read/write speed of 10MB per second. In addition for Windows Vista users, the thumb drive sports ReadyBoost. In case you are not sure how much 256GB represents; according to Kingston it can store 10 Blu-ray discs (~25 GB each), 54 DVD discs (~4.7 GB each), or 365 CD discs (~700 MB each). Unfortunately, high capacity storage does not come cheap, as it is set to retail for 565 Euros, or $924. It would definitely suck to misplace or break the small jump drive.

Anyone want to place bets for when the thumb drive breaks the one terabyte barrier?